Gillian Lynne

In conversation with Lynn Wallis

Gillian Lynne: When I decided to leave, which was a hell of a wrench (talk about diving off a board and not knowing quite whether you’d hit the water or not…), I went to the Palladium and the first thing that knocked me for six were the lights. Because, if you think about it, the lights at Covent Garden are always quite subdued, for things like Giselle and Swan Lake, but at most they’re very artistic, aren’t they? But at the Palladium it’s like full-up, you know, flat-out lighting. It was an amazing experience and the first show I did was, well, I think if I saw it now I’d probably have a fit, but it was with that wonderful woman, Vera Lynn. And there were all sorts of people like the Wiere Brothers and a boy who was very hot on the radio then called Brian Johnson, who had a divine voice. It was all like that, and Malcolm Goddard was my partner and I was a gypsy princess for one scene, and something else for another, and he was my lover… Anyway we did quite a few pas de deux and the lights were so bright I could not see him so I used to say, ‘La, da da… I’m coming!’ as I ran. And we had one lift, I remember, where I did a flip in mid-air and went backwards into him and I could no more see him than fly through the moon, I just used to yell, “I’m coming!” and hope he’d catch me. And they were blinding, these lights.

But, there was a marvellous, erm, discipline in that theatre. It was run by three men. One was called Charlie Henry, who was the real boss. He had an immaculate suit and he was razor thin and he had the bearing of a Commander in Chief. And then there was the kind of showman who ran it called Val Parnell, who was very famous, and then there was almost the best stage manager I have ever known called Jack Matthews. And these three men controlled that theatre and it was so fantastically well run, and it was utterly different from the Garden.

And people used to say to me, ‘How could you do that? How could you leave Covent Garden and go to the Palladium?’.

And I said, ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I find the Palladium just as high up in the theatre stakes as Covent Garden; it’s absolutely different. It’s on a different side of itself and all of that, but the discipline is, if anything, greater, and I am very happy here, and I’m learning a lot, because I’m on every single night, twice a night and three times on Wednesdays and three times on Saturdays, and, it’s an audience that has not paid to see dance, so you’ve got to be so good to hold them, and therefore I’m learning an amazing amount!’ And I did.

And then I stayed there. I did the pantomime that year, which Pauline Grant choreographed. I was Oceana in a great underwater ballet and the Palladium has two magnificent revolves: it has the outer revolve and an inner revolve, and they used to come up and the outer one was going one way and the inner one was going another way and then I came up through a tiny little hole in the middle of all that, covered in pearls as the Queen of the Sea…

So, Pauline Grant and I got on very well and the management liked the welding of what she did and how I interpreted it. So, they said, we want to put ballet back into variety because, I don’t know if you remember, that Adeline Genée, [Anna] Pavlova, all sorts of people used to dance in variety all over the world and they decided they wanted to put ballet back into variety. And so I was there on and off for three years. I did lots of variety bills where I was hired to close the first half with a bang. That was how they described it to me. So, virtually, I had to keep the house very warm and right up so that the way was paved for the star. And Pauline was ruthless with me. She said, ‘Now, Gillian, you’ve got to hold an audience that has not paid to see dance. And a variety audience at that. So, I want tricks.’

So she used to have the front-cloth put down which meant a tiny little bit of the stage left and she made me do pirouettes fifth to fifth en dehors to the right, 32 fifth to fifth en dehors to the left, 32. I then had to do fouettés, to the right and left, and then lots of posé turns across it with doubles and triples and everything, and in the end I could do amazing turns, but it’s because she was ruthless. And I mean it was either fall into the pit or manage your pirouette!

Lynn Wallis: After you’d made the break and had done all these things were you still, sort of, hankering back?

Gillian Lynne: A little bit. I mean, Margot [Fonteyn]’s mother, Mrs [Hilda] Hookham, came to see me, ‘The Black Queen,’ as we called her and said, ‘Gillian. What a waste! What a waste darling! You know you were one of our white-hot hopes!’

And I said, ‘Well, it didn’t always feel like that’.

Then Ninette came to see me in the showiest of all these ballets in variety, and it was very showy. I did amazing tricks, and Ninette said, ‘I think you should come back, Lynne, I didn’t know you had this strength’. And she didn’t; it was her mistake, that. She said, ‘I want you to come back’.

And I thought about it, you know, and I rang her up and said, ‘Madam, I’m so honoured and so thrilled, but I’ve sort of tasted another world now and I think going back in life isn’t the wisest thing in the world. That’s just how I feel’.

What I didn’t say to her: ‘If you’d let me do the Miller’s Wife in Tricorne as [Léonide] Massine wanted…’

Massine wanted, and I only knew that because Vera Volkova and Sophie Fedorovitch, who were great friends of mine, because I worked with Vera all the time in class, and, of course, they were Russian, so when Massine came he stayed with them and they were very close and, in the end, after the week of classes he gave they said, you know, ‘Who are you going to choose?’

And he said, ‘Well, the one I really want has got a Russian soul, and that’s Gillian.’

They made the mistake of ringing up and I was actually in the bath and I heard my husband of the time say, ‘I don’t believe it! Vera, is that true? How fantastic! Are you sure?’ erm. .. hmmm.  Then he came in and said, ‘Gilly, Massine has chosen you to do the Miller’s Wife’.  I was just so thrilled and over the moon and I knew I could do it. That’s the thing. I knew I could do it.

I went into the theatre on Monday and looked at the notice board; our whole lives then were controlled by what the notice board would say, and it said ‘[Margot] Fonteyn, [Violetta] Elvin, [Julia] Farron, [Pauline] Clayden, [Gillian] Lynne’ and it was a heart-break actually. And it’s what did it. And Bobby [Robert Helpmann] knew this. He observed all this and he knew perfectly well what had gone on, and it was he that came and said they want a star dancer at the Palladium and I have said they have to have you.

So it was a bit weird when she said ‘Come back’. You know.  I was a bit like, ‘Well, couldn’t you see it before’. I think she got bamboozled, Ninette, because I got married very young and that was a disaster. I shouldn’t have got married and I think she thought I wasn’t serious and then when she saw me doing twice as much as one ever did at the Garden I think she realised she had made a mistake. But I, one way and another, I couldn’t go back.

I thought what had happened to me was just silly, not unjust, silly, but I worshipped her choreography. I thought she ran the company absolutely brilliantly. I liked her humour. I know she was strict, but I’ve always liked that. I like strict things, and I loved to do her work. I mean Job was a joy. I was started as an angel and ended up as a daughter, and I danced the Black Queen in Checkmate. And, you see, that was really hard, because I danced the Black Queen. She gave me the Black Queen. She didn’t really teach me. I had no rehearsals. I had to go outside to Pamela [May], who by that time was sort of retired, semi-retired, and she taught me the role of the Black Queen in her, like this, in her drawing-room. Then, luckily for me, Victor Gsovsky used to teach in London and he was around at that time and I just took it to him and he coached me. Anyway, after the second performance she was waiting in the wings, after I’d taken my call, and she said, ‘Lynne, that was very, very good. In fact, you are my favourite Black Queen.’ And that really meant something to me, you know. ‘Cos her choreography was, it spoke to me, and it was very modern, it was way ahead.

Lynn Wallis: Who were the people that had influence on you in terms of your own choreography?

Gillian Lynne: Her. Every time I’ve ever done anything I’ve thought, ‘Oops, Madam! I’ve learned this detail from Madam’. Fred Astaire, Jacques Lecoq, the wonderful mime teacher in Paris, that’s about it… A lot from Bobby’s theatricality, I guess, and, you know, to have been lucky enough to dance any of Fred [Frederick Ashton]’s ballets. You couldn’t not be influenced by that. But I wouldn’t. I mean Fred was one of the greats and I don’t consider myself that at all. It’s just I, you know, I worshipped his ballets …I mean just appearing in his ballets, that was lovely.

And then, you know, I worked with Dudley Moore. I met Dudley and worked so much with him so then I got deeply into jazz, but real jazz, not club jazz, I mean, really good jazz that he taught me. He taught me incredible timings, which is when I started to choreograph, nobody could ever get my timings to begin with. I had one assistant who said ‘I can’t get this timing, I can’t!’

And I said, ‘It will work darling, you’ll find if you do that …’

He said, ‘But, no, we’ll never fit those number of things in’. He said to somebody afterwards ‘She drives me mad. It always fits, it somehow always gets there!’

Well, that’s because Dudley taught me how a jazz pianist particularly will take a theme and then he’ll start to extemporise and he’ll go and there will be that beat and you think, he’s never going to get back, that’s never going to marry up again and then … it does! And, I’ve found that very useful choreographically.

The best bit of choreography, probably I ever did, classically, was A Midsummer Marriage, Sir Michael Tippett, at the Garden [Covent Garden]. That timing! Every other bar has a different count. You can’t say its 5/8 or 6/8 or 5/4 or 3/3 or anything normal. It’s all different and I like to learn a score before I choreograph. I was once in the répétiteur’s room – it was before they’d done the Garden up, I did this in ’68, – and I came out looking like this: grey of feature.  I’d been working with the pianist, and we’d been trying to learn it and it was nearly impossible. And I said, ‘I’ll have to learn it like a piece of Shakespeare. I’ll have to learn to speak it because it’s… so…’. I came out looking like this…

And Fred was having a cup of tea and he said, ‘Lynne, go and get a cup of tea you look exhausted and come and sit with me’. So I went back and sat with him.

“What are you doing?” he said. I said, ‘I’m trying to learn the score that I’m going to choreograph of Midsummer Marriage. It’s Tippett and it’s really hard.’

And he said, ‘Ooh darling, darling, listen to me!’, he said, ‘When I’ve got a score like that, when I’ve got music like that, I find out the number of bars and then I choreograph it to a waltz and somehow it always fits’.

And I said, ‘But Fred, you’re a great choreographer! I’m not like that. I, slavishly, have to find out all these different time schemes and things.’